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in my last english exam ever I thought I did pretty well on the poetry bit

got the exam back and got like 3/20 or something for that section, stupid arbitrary bullshit

sciences majors...

To be fair, there is a lot of arbitrary bullshit in English classes.

I like to think I do well enough in them to speak with some minuscule measure of authority.

The work itself has fair to good odds of being about something, having concrete meaning, all that.

But what the teacher wants back is, sadly, not always related to the work itself.

chances are you don't understand the work in question

i just got done marking a bunch of stupid fucking exams, and most of them had the same tone as this post

Fair enough.

Sometimes I am totally off base in judging a work.

Not thinking of my bad grades here. My bad ones are almost always earned. Thinking of good ones with glowing compliments where I knew I was randomly spouting bullshit.

And I may have implied that was a majority when it's more a minority. But I have ran into some arbitrary lit classes, and arbitrary portions of generally good classes. Of course, some to most of those could be entirely my faults in perception.

Well I mean
If you are in school, chances are you're a pretentious asshole
And as such cannot accept that perhaps somebody who has extensively studied a particular subject for the purposes of teaching it may have some insight into the symbols in a work that they themselves do not have
Also because there's no way to tell what the heck the author meant and it's entirely possible the curtains were just fucking blue

What was really fun was reading an excerpt from A Modest Proposal
The parts that were played straight
Then the teacher told us that we were idiots if we didn't pick up on the sarcasm
And then a year later I read the essay in its entirety and noticed the final paragraphs, in which the sarcasm actually becomes clear
And everything fell into place

Doesn't that work out to mean that the teacher also doesn't know what the author means and is pulling shit out his/her ass too?

chances are the teacher is backing up their claim with evidence from the rest of the text

although a lot of people think introductory english lit is about telling people what books are about, really it's about demonstrating ways to think about sets of knowledge and to find certain patterns given source material

so when they're saying that blue curtains mean depression, they're also trying to get you to see that curtains cover a vantage point, that blue has connotations as a colour, and that often the best writing is the kind that you can't take at face value, because the enjoyment comes from thinking about aspects of the writing and coming to a realization about how they work within the broader story

I've never been a math or science person because I am terrible at both; but I always liked how there was a definite underlying truth.

While on the other hand, I BSed my way through much of English, despite generally liking the subject. It was usually a matter of sussing out what the teacher wanted to see, and otherwise making an argument for whatever your 'point' was regardless of whether or not you believed in it. Within a month or two teachers had usually given out a couple of every 'type' of assignment that would be expected, and students developed a formulaic system for fulfilling them. Some of these assignment 'types' endured from year to year, and we became very good at being minimally creative in completing them, which was magnified when we got to working on them in groups.

I don't know how beneficial or detrimental that latter point was. We completed our work much faster and got higher marks, but our work definitely became more homogeneous, despite active efforts to keep our writing from being so.

Doesn't that work out to mean that the teacher also doesn't know what the author means and is pulling shit out his/her ass too?

chances are the teacher is backing up their claim with evidence from the rest of the text

although a lot of people think introductory english lit is about telling people what books are about, really it's about demonstrating ways to think about sets of knowledge and to find certain patterns given source material

so when they're saying that blue curtains mean depression, they're also trying to get you to see that curtains cover a vantage point, that blue has connotations as a colour, and that often the best writing is the kind that you can't take at face value, because the enjoyment comes from thinking about aspects of the writing and coming to a realization about how they work within the broader story

Stuff like this just made me hate reading, just absolutely ruined books for me that I enjoyed before reading them for class. Every story doesn't need to be full of symbolism and allegory, sometimes a curtain is just a curtain.

Doesn't that work out to mean that the teacher also doesn't know what the author means and is pulling shit out his/her ass too?

chances are the teacher is backing up their claim with evidence from the rest of the text

although a lot of people think introductory english lit is about telling people what books are about, really it's about demonstrating ways to think about sets of knowledge and to find certain patterns given source material

so when they're saying that blue curtains mean depression, they're also trying to get you to see that curtains cover a vantage point, that blue has connotations as a colour, and that often the best writing is the kind that you can't take at face value, because the enjoyment comes from thinking about aspects of the writing and coming to a realization about how they work within the broader story

Stuff like this just made me hate reading, just absolutely ruined books for me that I enjoyed before reading them for class. Every story doesn't need to be full of symbolism and allegory, sometimes a curtain is just a curtain.

This is probably why no one invites econ majors to parties.

i had a long post that got ate by a busy server.

the short version:

how would it ruin books for you? it's still there. you're free to read it however you want, except in a literature class, in which case you're actually paying them to tell you how to read it.

So got an interesting demand from the production manager at the college radio station today. After my co-host & I did our two-hour show he told my co-host that we're going to need to make our two-hour show into a three hour-show. Now it is important to understand the history of my radio show.

Two years ago we were originally on in the evenings from 8 to 10 p.m. This was a terrific time slot and we were building a really great fan-base for our product. Well with the start of last year we were moved to 7 to 10 in the morning. So we did that for for a year and were pretty disgruntled with it because it was worse in almost every way but as a talk-show at a college radio station you are treated like a red-headed stepchild. Well jump ahead to the start of this year when we were told that our radio show had to be cut down an hour because nobody wanted to listen for that extra hour and could be better utilized.

So here we are, seven months later, going back to where we used to be. Except I'm not going to have that happen, I'm pretty much stonewalling the production manager on this and telling him to deal with his decision.

It's not about enjoying the work, it's about scouring it for theories and social commentary.

And, of course, the novels that are studied are entirely composed of theories and social commentary, so the narrative is painfully obtuse.

Then again, I might just be fed up of literary analysis after doing it for the last six years.

I think this is really dumb, and I think that the fact that you see "enjoying a work" and analyzing it as mutually exclusive says more about your capability to be a good reader than it does anything else

also I'm interested to hear which books you thinks have "painfully obtuse" narratives

I've never been a math or science person because I am terrible at both; but I always liked how there was a definite underlying truth.

heh

that gets annoying after a while once you realise that yeah there is, but you can never actually know exactly what it is, just better and better approximations of it

Ha, yeah I know. Just . . . the principle of it, you know?

Orik, I think you'd make for an interesting English teacher. Our small group of AP kids is just trudging through the course material with gritted teeth at this point. Many of us stopped reading for leisure as our English classes wore on.